The Folded Clock (9 page)

Today I read a book written by a man I used to know. When I'd known him I was a certain kind of woman, or girl, that I'm not very proud of having been. I was a woman who used men. I used them quite knowingly. I didn't ever try to fool myself that I wasn't using them. Nor did I feel bad about my behavior. I felt that it was my due, though I don't know why I felt I was due anything. Men had done nothing to make me feel owed. Men had mostly been nice to me.

When I met this man, I had just moved to New York. I was temporarily crashing with an old friend who lived in a narrow three-story house located in the middle of a block in Little Italy. To get to this house we had to walk through an apartment building, out the other side, and into the courtyard where the slender house seemed to break through the cobbles like a tree. My friend and I shared a bed, and the bed was white, and a white sheer curtain billowed weakly over us at night, because there was a heat wave, and the house had no air-conditioning, and the windows, despite the staler air in the courtyard, were always open. Meanwhile, on the lower levels of the house, people drank red wine and did coke until morning. I just wanted to sleep.
I'd moved to New York to become serious. Soon my friend and I would find a very serious artists' loft together. (We would have to interview with the loft's banker landlords to prove that we seriously were, or seriously wanted to be, artists. We would have to sublet the extra bedroom to an actor from a teen movie with a serious cult following, and who desired instead to be a serious concert pianist.)

I was not planning on having a New York boyfriend because I'd left a serious boyfriend in San Francisco. We were in love and intended to spend the summer together. But this meant I would have to survive in New York for the bulk of the year alone. I did not function well alone. I had not been alone since I started dating in third grade. I could count my alone days on two hands. I always had friends; I was never
alone
. But whenever I didn't have a boyfriend around I panicked. My future unspooled blurrily and I was felled by psychological vertigo, it was like standing on the sill of my loft windows overlooking the Holland Tunnel and the Hudson and the old printing press in the building opposite mine that respected no work hours—it was just on and on and on and on.

The man who wrote the book I read today had the misfortune of becoming the designated New York person who made me less fearful and lonely that year. I was never unaware that he wanted to be my boyfriend, and I was never dissuading him of his desire. I needed that level of devotion from him; a mere friend would not do. I gave him the hope that if he waited for the countrywide distance to dull my affection for my real boyfriend, he was next in line. He'd get the rest of my heart and all of my body.

He would get neither. He was one of those men I wanted to want to fuck. He was never a temptation even though we found ourselves in erotically and romantically
charged situations where the minor sticking point of “attraction” should have been immaterial. Once when he was house-sitting for a friend with a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, we decided to drag a mattress onto the roof and sleep outside. Nineteen years later, I recall that night as one of the most magical nights I've spent in the city. And yet there was no sex. I experienced no desire. It was just me and a boy on a mattress in the air, the noise and the heat of the city billowing beneath us, keeping us afloat, and what a waste it was.

Also he was fun and funny and he had excellent friends. Oh, the poor men who have excellent friends. This man was friends with writers who were older, and already ruined by booze, with sloppily intricate bohemian approaches to love and to work. Once they had a Super Bowl party, not an ironic one. (These were sporty-spirited bohemians.) At halftime we went to the park and played touch football. We divvied into teams. My team captain had boyish hair and a boyish way of rousing us to achieve the highest possible level of sportsmanship, despite the fact that we would certainly be crushed. I recall thinking what a great dad he'd be someday—a fun and self-deceivingly optimistic dad, not one of those grumpy dads, the ones for which everything appears as an impossibility. Even a sandwich is impossible.

Eventually, when my California boyfriend and I split up, I started dating this future great dad. I did not date the man who thought he was next in line to date me. I did him the even greater disservice of dating a man he'd introduced me to, because he'd so thoughtfully included me in his life when I didn't have much of my own. All of it was shitty, so very shitty. And yet I did not feel shitty. Neither did any of
my friends feel shitty when they used men like I did, and worse. One of my friends who got a lease in an uninhabitable factory tempted a man with great plumbing and electrical skills to fall in love with her. She kept him hooked on hope until he'd renovated her space, then stopped returning his calls. If I judged her, perhaps it was because I was trying to make myself feel less guilty for not feeling guilty when I'd behaved similarly. I'd never gone that far, I told myself. I'd never used a man to do something I might have paid another to do. I could not pay a man to be my friend and to introduce me to fun people. I could not pay a man to make me feel less alone. That was different, wasn't that different?

Today my friend told me about her gay male therapist crush. The crush seems mutual and for obvious reasons safe for all involved. Their relationship sounded so enviable. Recently, after a ten-year hiatus, I'd decided to go to therapy again. I made this decision abruptly, at two p.m. on a Thursday. I left the library. I went home and checked my insurance's website. I found an eligible provider within walking distance. I called her. She answered. She said, “Can you be here in an hour?”

The therapist, I'd discover, was a 1950s-era bohemian now in her seventies. She lived in a massive rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive that smelled of mothballs. She wore plaid shirts and jeans; she had wispy honey-colored hair that she seemed not to have brushed
for decades, and that she'd twisted into a tiny knot atop her head. She had a crisp Katharine Hepburn properness to her speech.

She was also possibly senile. She seemed always to have left something she needed in another room. In the middle of our first session, her doorbell rang. It was a girl in her late teens. I heard the therapist whispering with her in the foyer. When the therapist returned, she told me that she'd forgotten she'd scheduled an appointment with the girl during my time slot. “But that was
weeks
ago,” she said, as if it were the girl's fault for booking so early. She told me that the girl had abandoned college after less than one semester; that she was confused by life. The therapist did nothing to hide her disdain for this girl's problems. She seemed to be suggesting that we were working on much more vital and complicated problems.
Adult
problems.

I quickly understood that I would never tell this therapist much of anything that mattered to me. I'd talk, but I would not seek her counsel or advice. Our hour crept by. The hour felt like three hours. I had to tell her about my “family of origin,” and she drew facile connections between my behavior and my relationship to my parents. At the end of each of our four sessions—I saw her only four times—she would pronounce that I needed medication, and that talk therapy was pointless for people like me, at least until I was on drugs.

I also sensed she didn't like me. Or maybe it wasn't that she didn't like me—she felt overwhelmed by me. In truth I was pretty unstrung. Normally it takes me months to reveal any emotion to a therapist, if I ever do; I once had a therapist who accused me of treating our sessions like a cocktail party encounter. This was not an inaccurate description of how I viewed our meetings. I adored
this therapist. I joked that I paid her by the hour to be my pal. I wanted to be the patient she most looked forward to seeing; I strove always to be entertaining and never to be a drag. I took tissues from the box next to her couch only when I had a cold.

Meanwhile, I showed up to my second appointment with this new therapist in hysterics. I'd been buying a coffee at the Cuban place around the corner from her apartment when I'd received some bad news that shouldn't have come as a surprise, but it did. I left the Cuban place without my coffee. I tried not to cry until I made it to her apartment. Then I lost it. I said crazy, nonsensical, not-entirely-true shit. I spun for her the most negative and hopeless account of my life and its prospects. I voiced interconnected paranoias. Once I started I couldn't stop. I gave myself permission to be the darkest, most repellant version of myself. It was liberating not to care, for maybe the only time in my life, what another person thought of me.

The two appointments that followed were awkward. I was embarrassed by my breakdown. To compensate I was chatty and witty and entertaining. I told stories about my most outrageous family members; I told
stories
. Not lies, exactly. But I emphasized the interesting and salacious parts. She asked me at one point, “Do you love your mother-in-law?”

The fifth time I went to her apartment, she didn't answer her door. I'd arrived that day with an ulterior motive. I'd brought a single shoe that I wanted to photograph on her couch. A German artist I admire often violates other people's houses with her personal belongings. She put her nightgown in a friend's closet and her diary under another friend's pillow. Her art is a form of burglary where she adds things instead of subtracting them. I planned to
do this when my therapist left me alone in her living room to retrieve something she'd forgotten in her kitchen.

When she failed to answer the door, I wondered: did she somehow guess what I'd planned to do on her couch? Then, more logically, I figured, given her track record, had she forgotten our appointment? I rang again. Nothing. I went home. I thought she'd realize her mistake and call me to apologize and reschedule. She didn't. I started to worry that maybe she'd died. I Googled her name + “dead”; I found nothing. Maybe, I thought, she's just expecting me to show up next week, at which point she'll explain what happened. The day of my appointment I couldn't decide whether or not to go. I could have called her, but I didn't want to risk talking to her. (She was the only therapist on the planet who answered her phone.) I didn't go. Certainly, I thought, she'd call me now. After our first session I'd signed a contract committing me to pay in full if I ever missed an appointment without twenty-four-hours' cancellation notice.

The therapist did not call me. She never contacted me again.

Nor did I ever contact her. I was happy to have been freed from this unsatisfactory arrangement without needing to do or say anything (therapist breakups are such a meta-trial). I've often wondered what happened to her. What if she didn't have a stroke? What if she wasn't sick or hospitalized, and thus unable to make phone calls? What if she just genuinely disliked me? I had been to other therapists, most of whom I'd gotten along with well enough. But our relationships were predicated on my “putting my best face forward.” When I was sad, I'd make jokes about my sadness. I'd been so totally hilarious when I'd talked to my pal therapist about my then-upcoming divorce. With this
new therapist I'd let my ugliest self show. Either she'd had a stroke, or she'd died, or she'd simply decided: I cannot help that woman. I cannot bear to be around that woman.